October 24, 2000
Pairing: 5+1/1+5
Warnings: Angst.
Notes:
Look for Ethan Frome allusions.
It was a crisp fall afternoon.
You know how sometimes, when the sun's aiming just right for your eyes, and since you left your jacket in your car, the wind's biting your face something fierce, and the leaves are crunch- crunching beneath your feet? Your hands may even be raw, crackling pink from the cold. Your nose feels ready to bleed, or run, or maybe just fall off. Splat. Would you even notice it?
And the bus is going HONKHONKHONK and the children are passing by, carrying with them minutes of days and days. The monotony of time is an enemy that cannot be exterminated.
And yet, there's something different in the horn this particular day. Something in the air. Heero could feel it in his blood. It sang softly.
One of those days that makes you glad to be alive.
Just one of those big, bright, red-letter days that shows up unexpected-like in your mailbox, on your front porch, every now and then. You don't know it, but then it blows up in your face, laughing, as if to say
"HERE I AM!" Heero smiled as a little girl popped out from behind a tree, dark brown hair flapping in the breeze. He walked carefully towards her, hands shoved into his pockets with thought-out casualty. Above his head, the sun turned circles in the slow undulations of fall reds and oranges.
"There you are," he agreed softly, kneeling beside her. "But it's almost time for your dinner--you should really get back inside now." The girl pouted adorable, then smiled, revealing a double- hilled gap where her front teeth had been.
"Okay. See ya later!" She ran back inside, nearly tripping over the front steps, grinning at him to let him know she was all right. Heero began to walk away until Saint Helen's House for the Orphaned was only a pepper speck on the horizon. He had been volunteering there since the end of the war. At first for Duo; now for himself.
He felt cold.
The Japanese man, twenty years old and looking upon the next forty as one looks on an eternity in the Burning Place, dragged himself home and made supper. It tasted flat, like sawdust and funny lemon slices that were supposed to be exotic, but had a more revolting edge to them.
He brushed his teeth and turned the bathroom light off with a light hand. Then he turned down the covers on the bed for two and laid down.
Heero was still cold.
He didn't sleep.
He couldn't.
One of those red-letter porch days.
Good time to be alive.
"We must put the war behind us!" He was a sleek businessman in a fat-wallet Armani suit. "Put the war *behind* us, friends!"
Heero looked around the room, at the degenerating and the sickly, the trembling and the angry. He wasn't sure why he'd paid for a therapy class.
Maybe so he could pretend he was at least trying. It wasn't working.
"Put the war behind us," he whispered in chorus with the others, but in truth, the words were as empty as the mirror of the toilet bowl.
Heero moaned softly as he threw up the last of his dinner. It went like that, a lot.
He reached up with fumbling fingers and his hand pulsed around the metal catch for a moment before pushing down.
The water in the toilet spun round and round, forever and ever, melting into a canopy of leaves and into a face. Heero closed his eyes and his heart pulsed slowly, thumping against his rib cage.
He was pretty sure that if he sat up, it would soar out and up, flying high into the sky until it came too close to the sun and began to fall.
He went to see the girl again that day. She had been crying; there was a large scrape on her knee. "What happened?" he asked as he sat down beside her, folding up his legs. His knees reached a lot higher than they used to.
"Fell," she replied sulkily, crossing her arms over her chest.
"I'm sorry," said Heero.
"I know." The little girl looked out into the sunset where bleeding hearts stained the white clouds. It was going to rain the next day. Heero couldn't wait.
"I'm glad you visit me," she whispered. "No one ever visits Zillah. Or Edie."
Heero wanted to give her a hug, but he knew that she wouldn't let him. Or he wouldn't let himself. In the end, it was all the same endless, ugly difference.
"Shit!" Wufei swore as he watched his white leather couch being dragged across the muddy lawn. The rain came down in thick sheets, but he was determined that he would sleep in a bed for once in two weeks. "Watch what you're doing!" The two movers, short and stocky men with nameless faces, shrugged eloquently.
He looked at the house next door. The lights were all out. The Chinese man shivered in spite of himself.
A gloomy place. It seemed no one was home.
The neighborhood was quietly noisy.
He knew, instinctively, that some days the yards were filled with the hum of lawnmowers, of kids laughing and playing baseball in the street, but that house would stay silent.
Heero woke the next morning to the sound of pounding on his door. Pulling yesterday's loose jeans, he stomped downstairs, intending to give his neighbor a piece of his mind. Flinging the door open, he was greeted to the sight of a very wet Chang Wufei.
"Do you have a wrench I can borrow?" the man demanded, eyes never leaving his front stoop.
"Chang. What are you doing here?" The Chinese man's head shot up in alarm, eyes widening only slightly. Heero leaned against the door, waiting for an answer.
"Pipe leak. Yuy," he acknowledged. "Well? Do you have one or not?"
"I do." Heero tried not to smile. "Come inside and get dried off." They walked inside soundlessly, not even their footsteps rustling over the plush carpet.
"What have you been doing?" How did you survive?
"What haven't I done, you mean?" I've tried everything.
They looked at each other over cups of coffee. The shading of the living room made their bodies gray and filtered, leaving out the extra color, getting to the heart of the thing. After a moment, the wetter of the two could no longer stand the companionable silence.
"It's awfully quiet in here," remarked Wufei almost civilly. Then, "You should redecorate."
Heero raised a single eyebrow.
"Hand me the nails--Ow!" Heero swore violently into his sleeve as he accidentally dropped the hammer onto his bare foot. On the bottom of the ladder, Wufei laughed to himself and handed him a bucket of nails, then the painting.
"That's what you get for hogging the hammer, Yuy."
Heero smirked, and dropped the hammer on Wufei's head.
"Heero!" Relena poked her head inside the door and gasped. Heero descended down the staircase, holding the balustrade like some Hollywood primadonna, wearing a white silk robe. He had a book in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. Sunlight filtered into the enlarged and newly white foyer, giving the room a look of soft warmth and decadence. Classy, she thought, sniffing the scent of cinnamon in the air.
"Who did this?" she asked, stepping fully inside. "You?"
"Upset that someone beat you to it?" Heero asked, amused. Relena blushed as she remembered that she was holding two cans of latex paint.
"They did a better job than I ever could have," she said, circling the room in awe. "You couldn't even see two inches in front of your face the old way. Nice skylights." Relena was mostly quiet after that, except to make a few exclamations over the value of this or that painting, this Ming vase, that Faberge egg.
Heero's smile faded when the girl had gone. The house was quiet again, and somehow the sun's rays didn't seem quite as warm on his body. He shivered, feeling goosebumps rise on smooth skin.
"So what is there to do around here?" asked Wufei as he stretched lazily on Heero's couch. They were watching the bowling U.S. championships, a true testament to the inactivity of the surrounding town. Heero just shook his head, curling his toes into the cough cushion.
"Nothing much."
Wufei frowned and tossed a piece of popcorn at his Japanese neighbor. They weren't friends, not yet. Heero wasn't sure if Wufei wanted to be friends, if that was why he was always around, helping him redo his house, always wanting to do something with him.
"Then what do you do all day?" he sighed. "Surely you have some kind of life."
Heero bristled. "I have a life," he snapped, and tried to focus on the pink and orange shirts of the U.S. competitors.
Wufei's eyes glittered. "Well, then you won't mind if I tag along, will you?"
"Where to?" the Chinese man demanded as Heero hesitated on the sidewalk. He *should* go to his therapy session. He had paid tens of thousands of dollars for them... He felt his insides twist and felt like throwing up.
"This way," he whispered, the lead in the bottom of his growing with every step towards the gray building at the end of the street. Once inside, he felt the other man's eyes on his neck, raising the fine hairs there, sending sharp tingles down his spine. He left sweaty fingerprints on the buttons in the elevator.
The man in the business suit smiled dollar bills at them as he spied Wufei behind Heero. "Brought a friend with you, Heero?" The hidden emphasis on 'friend' was not lost on either of them; the blue-eyed man's face burned.
The session began with a ritual sharing of everyone's sob stories for the benefit of the new person. Their numbers kept swelling like a pus-filled sac; Heero wasn't sure why anymore.
As each war-stricken veteran began to speak, disgust replaced apathy inside him. He was afraid to look at the Chinese man, but more than once he heard the creaking of the chair as his hands clenched on the metal bars.
Before Heero even knew what he was doing, Wufei reached over and plucked his hand from his lap, making it into a loose fist, then tucking it within his own warmer palm. His breath caught as the other man's thumb began to lightly caress the sides of his hand, skimming over corded tendons and slender digits like over water. They sat like that until the natural lights outside dimmed into darkness.
Outside, it began to snow with the softest of caresses.
When they roused the cobwebbed corners with their endless chanting, Wufei grabbed Heero's arm and dragged him out of the room, swearing, saying, "You're never going back there, Heero, I'll kill you first." It made him feel kind of good, in a way, to hear someone finally say that. To have someone care enough...
They parted ways in front of Heero's door. For a moment, the light illuminated the high cheekbones of his neighbor in a way that made him seem gaunt, under-fed, starving. But then the mirage was gone, and instead, Wufei walked away, head bowed.
Heero sprinted up the stairs two at a time and watched the other man's silhouette from his bedroom. His arms unconsciously mimicking his actions, Heero slowly undressed himself and laid down on the bed, waiting for sleep to overtake him with the most reticent whisper of longing.
Ariana and Bianca
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